Edelman draws from Lacanian psychoanalysis and semiotics to argue that all signs create a rift between subject and self, and this ensures that there is always an excess which is both necessary to sustain the sign, but also threatens it (call this the "death drive"). He argues that this death drive is what "queer" has been identified with traditionally by conservatives. Even if the people who occupy the space of "queer" right now were to be displaced so that they could be assimilated into the public sphere, the space of queerness will still exist. So instead of the usual liberal route to "progress", Edelman suggests a new queer ethics wherein queers embrace their queerness as queerness. As a “gravedigger of society,” one who “care[s] nothing [for] the future,” Leonard, the sinthomosexual, annuls the temporality of desire, leaving futurity, like the reproductive Couple charged with the responsibility of bearing it, “suspended, interrupted, disrupted,” in the words de Man uses to characterize the impact of irony on narrative. [119] Leaving the “intelligibility of (representational) narrative disrupted at all times,” inducing, as de Man says elsewhere, “unrelieved vertige, dizziness to the point of madness,” irony, with its undoing of identity and refusal of historical progression, with its shattering of every totalized form (and of every form as totalization), names the figure as which Leonard’s relation to the terra-cotta figure figures him. [120] The shot of the broken clay figure adduced just after Leonard is shot, substituting the destruction of that object for the shattering of his body at the end of its fall, thus portrays, in the sinthomosexual’s fate, the fatality he would inflict: the dissolution effected by jouissance, before which, as Lacan asserts, “my neighbor’s body breaks into pieces.” The Tarascan figure thus literally embodies—by endowing with the image of a body—the central and structuring emptiness it is intended to contain. And true to the radical groundlessness that irony effects, we can never decide if the pieces of film that emerge when that figures breaks open are the precipitates of its emptiness—images, that is, of this hollowing-out, this vacancy that always inhabits the image as Imaginary lure—or images, instead, of the fantasy precipitated to counter such an emptiness: the fantasy of the image as negating such a vertiginous negativity, as filling the void with the fantasy structure that constitutes desire. For the strips of film, like North by Northwest, image the emptying-out of the image, the escape from its illusory “truth”; at the same time, though, and precisely by imaging the emptying-out of the image, they substantialize it once again, regenerating the Imaginary fantasy of a totalizing form. [121] Doesn’t Benjamin, in his “Conversations with Brecht,” seem to recognize something similar when he recalls his response to Brecht’s telling him It is true that the ranks of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual, and transgendered parents grow larger every day, and that nothing intrinsic to the constitution of those identifying as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, transsexual, or queer predisposes them to resist the appeal of futurity, to refuse the temptation to reproduce, or to place themselves outside or against the acculturating logic of the Symbolic. Neither, indeed, is there any ground we could stand on outside that logic. In urging an alternative to the party line, which every party endorses, in taking a side outside the logic of reproductive futurism and arguing that queers might embrace their figural association with its end, I am not for a moment assuming that queers—by which I mean all so stigmatized for failing to comply with heteronormative mandates—are not themselves also psychically invested in preserving the familiar familial narrativity of reproductive futurism. [18] But politics, construed as oppositional or not, never rests on essential identities. It centers, instead, on the figurality that is always essential to identity, and thus on the figural relations in which social identities are always inscribed. Far from speaking, with the sinthomosexual, for the death drive and its disarticulation of forms, Baudrillard remains an advocate here of reproductive futurism, explicitly enlisting this notion of death, this resistance to immortality, against the force of the death drive, which he assimilates to, and disavows as, the paradigm of sameness: “The death drive, according to Freud, is precisely this nostalgia for a state before the appearance of individuality and sexual differentiation, a state in which we lived before we became mortal and distinct from one another” (6). He may trumpet what he calls here the “fight for death” in thus opposing himself to the death drive, disparaged as eternal pursuit of the Same and hence as immortality, but opprobrium, in Baudrillard’s argument, still attaches to the death drive only insofar as it constitutes a mortal threat to the survival of the human—insofar, that is, as its sameness might make human difference different. The immortality for which he reproves it, then, threatens the human precisely with a death he would have us fight against. It names the endless negation of form, and so of what, for Baudrillard, defines the value of “difference”: that is, our distinctly human identity.

Al fin y al cabo, el problema de Edelman es el mismo de muchos otros: prescribe y describe a la vez. Si la homosexualidad fuera efectivamente pura negatividad, no habría falta insistir en que debe serlo. Su negativa a la normalización es, por un lado, políticamente peligrosa: como señala Zizek en Menos que nada, se articula con la postura homofóbica de que no debe permitirse adoptar a las parejas homosexuales. Y, en términos más generales, no queda claro cómo se expresa materialmente la filosofía política manifestada en No Future. Falta de materialismo, ahí el problema. Lee Edelman was born in 1953. [1] He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree from Northwestern University, and he received an MPhil and a PhD from Yale University. Edelman, Lee (December 2016). "An Ethics of Desubjectivation?". differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies. Duke University Press. 27 (3): 106–118. doi: 10.1215/10407391-3696679.Qué quiere decir que la (sint)homosexualidad debe rechazar estructurarse en torno a las categorías simbólicas del mundo heterosexual? En términos específicos, ¿qué hacer? I found this to be an intellectually stimulating if not pretty difficult read. Basic understanding of Lacanian jargon is essential I think. My reading is temporary and provisional but as of right now it is: Like Smith’s philosophy, Edelman’s queerness begins with a bodily-cum-psychic experience of failure and rupture. Using Lacan, Edelman distinguishes between desire , which is attached to the temporality and sociality of fantasy, and the drive , the bio-psychological urges for pleasure that are experienced by subjects as both “alien and internal,” disrupting our coherent image of ourselves. The drive gives us jouissance , which refers both to orgasm and to that “inarticulable surplus that dismantles the subject from within.” While desire allows the self to cohere around the imagined scenario of a future happiness, the drive annihilates these fantasies, returning us to a disorienting encounter with “the real.”

James Bennet, “Clinton, in Ad, Lifts Image of Parent,” New York Times, 4 March 1997, A18, New England edition. Truth, like queerness, irreducibly linked to the “aberrant or atypical,” to what chafes against “normalization,” finds its value not in a good susceptible to generalization, but only in the stubborn particularity that voids every notion of a general good. The embrace of queer negativity, then, can have no justification if justification requires it to reinforce some positive social value; its value, instead, resides in its challenge to value as defined by the social, and thus in its radical challenge to the very value of the social itself. [8] Fantasy is “the central prop and underlying agency… [that] endows reality with fictional coherence and stability, which seems to guarantee that such reality, the social world in which we take our place, will still survive when we do not.” Identifying with future selves, and then organizing our lives around efforts to become those future selves, we come to take for granted that we are stable, self-directed beings who move through a more-or-less unchanging world towards a chosen destination. We can even imagine, with a sanguine perspective, the persistence of projects like ours in this world after our death, and thus reconcile ourselves to mortality by fantastically identifying with a future in which we no longer exist. Unfortunately for us, fantasy does not seem to be something that can be generated at will. It requires, as Smith and Berlant insist with different emphases, a certain material basis of physical, psychological and social well-being. In her critique of philosophy as a way of death, however, Arendt argues that the performative power of language can reconnect us in a common imagined future—and, she insists, overcome the traditional separation of philosophy and democracy. This linguistic performance is analyzed in her The Human Condition (1958) as the act of promising, and in her “Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy” (1970) as a kind of seduction in which “one can only ‘woo’ and ‘court.’” In other words, to overcome both the absence of futurity and fantasy in our present impasse, and to survive the sterile conflict between philosophy and the political life of democracy, we must think through the particular set of performances by which people promise and seduce each other. We should consider democracy as a kind of love affair, a marriage of present and future. Leo Bersani wrote of his most recent book, No Future, "In consistently brilliant theoretical discussions Lee Edelman is a professor and chair of the English Department at Tufts University. Lee Edelman began his academic career as a scholar of twentieth-century American poetry. He has since become a central figure in the development, dissemination, and rethinking of queer theory. His current work explores the intersections of sexuality, rhetorical theory, cultural politics, and film. He holds an appointment as the Fletcher Professor of English Literature and he is currently the Chair of the English Department. He gained international recognition for his books about queer theory, post-structuralism, psychoanalytic theory, and cultural studies.

Lee Edelman is a professor and chair of the English Department at Tufts University. Lee Edelman began his academic career as a scholar of twentieth-century American poetry. He has since become a central figure in the development, dissemination, and rethinking of queer theory. His current work explores the intersections of sexuality, rhetorical theory, cultural politics, and film. He holds an appointment as the Fletcher Professor of English Literature and he is currently the Chair of the English Department. He gained international recognition for his books about queer theory, post-structuralism, psychoanalytic theory, and cultural studies. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954–1955, ed. Jacques Alain-Miller, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli (New York: Norton, 1991), 326. This paradox determines the trajectory of a recent essay by Jean Baudrillard that was published under the deliberately inflammatory title, “The Final Solution.” Baudrillard asserts that the human species is confronting a life-and-death crisis around the question of reproduction, more specifically, around its determination by way of sameness or difference. But a vortex of contradictions engulfs his use of these various terms, occasioning, or rather seeming to occasion, a transvaluation of values in accordance with which they appear to signify against our expectations: “There is something occulted inside us: our deaths. But something else is hidden there, lying in wait for us within each of our cells: the forgetting of death. In our cells our immortality lies in wait for us. It’s common to speak of the struggle of life against death, but there is an inverse peril. And we must struggle against the possibility that we will not die. At the slightest hesitation in the fight for death—a fight for division, for sex, for alterity, and so for death—living beings become once again indivisible, identical to one another—and immortal.” [83]

A controversial part of the queer theory canon, Edelman's No Future is both polemical (self-described) and playful (ascribed by me) in its critique of what Edelman describes as both "reproductive futurism" (2) and "the fascism of the baby's face" (151). Edelman's main theoretical argument here consists of two key components. First, that the figure of the Child structures politics, what is considered "the political," and what is considered "the human/the inhuman" by reinforcing a mode of futurity that ensures reproduction of itself; and second, that the inescapable death drive is figured through, ascribed to, and becomes symbolized by the sinthomosexual. Though, as Edelman argues, "all sexuality is sinthomosexuality" (73), sinthomosexuality is ascribed to queer subjectivities, and as such, queer sexualities symbolize a challenge to, or the end of, reproductive futurity--something that Edelman argues must be taken up by queer subjectivies (or those "queered") as a mode of resisting reproductive futurism.

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Like Faron, the narrator of The Children of Men, for whom sex in a world without procreation—without “the hope of posterity, for our race if not for ourselves”—becomes “almost meaninglessly acrobatic,” Baudrillard recoils in horror before this “useless” sexuality. And a “useless function” for Baudrillard, as his use of the same phrase elsewhere suggests, means one that refuses meaning: “At the extreme limit of computation and the coding and cloning of human thought (artificial intelligence), language as a medium of symbolic exchange becomes a definitively useless function. For the first time in history we face the possibility of a Perfect Crime against language, an aphanisis of the symbolic function.” [86] Aphanisis, the term Ernest Jones introduced to identify the anxiety-inducing prospect of the disappearance of desire, refers in the passage from Baudrillard to the fading or, more ominously, to what he describes as the “global extermination of meaning” (70), the unraveling of the braid in which reproductive futurism twines meaning, desire, and the fantasy of (hetero)sexual rapport. At the same time, though, it also evokes the subsequent use of the word by Lacan, for whom it refers instead to the fading or disappearance of the subject, whose division the signifier effects in such a way that “there is no subject without, somewhere, aphanisis of the subject.” Lacan will then go on to add, “There is an emergence of the subject at the level of meaning only from its aphanisis in the Other locus, which is that of the unconscious.” [87] Meaning, that is, against whose aphani sis Baudrillard’s jeremiad is launched, always already entails, for Lacan, the aphanisis of the unconscious: “When the subject appears somewhere as meaning, he is manifested elsewhere as ‘fading,’ as disappearance” (218). Appalled by the imminence of a “final solution,” the liberation from sexual difference intended by the force of “perpetual indivision and successive iterations of the same,” Baudrillard holds fast to the meaning whose “global extermination” sinthomosexuality is always imagined to effect and whose Symbolic exchange jouissance would reduce to a “definitively useless function.” [88] And he does so in the hope of perpetuating the temporal movements of desire, of shielding himself from the unconscious and the iterations of the drive, and securing, through futurity, through the victory of narrative duration over irony’s explosive negativity, a ground on which to stand: “The stakes,” he warns, “are no longer only that ‘history’ is slipping into the ‘posthistorical,’ but that the human race is slipping into the void” (19)’ Edelman, Lee (1994). Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory. New York: Routledge. ISBN 9780415902588. OCLC 28634490. The book represents a rigorous attempt to think at once generatively and against tropes of generation, to work at once in irony and in earnest to demonstrate the political’s material dependence on Symbolic homo-logy.”Whether we decide to follow Edelman’s example of rejecting the future or vehemently react against his polemic, No Future leaves no doubt that we cannot get around thinking critically about the uses and abuses of futurity.“The book represents a rigorous attempt to think at once generatively and against tropes of generation, to work at once in irony and in earnest to demonstrate the political’s material dependence on Symbolic homo-logy.” — Jana Funke , thirdspace To “know the world’s the same”: through purporting to be wed to the value of difference in heterosexual combination and exchange futurism merely perpetuates Lammeter’s tenacious will to sameness by endlessly turning the Other into the image of itself, endlessly protecting the fantasy space in which it is always there. Narcissism, on the other hand, construed in terms of sterility and a nonproductive sameness, takes in and takes on, perhaps too well, the Other it loves to death, pushing beyond and against its own pleasure, driving instead toward the end of forms through the formalism of the drive. Freud, as the century just ended began, already advised us that parental love demands to be viewed as “nothing but the parents’ narcissism born again.” [80] But the ostensible self-evidence, throughout our culture, of the difference between narcissism, on the one hand, and the selflessness we associate with the care and nurturing of children, on the other, between the figures of sinthomosexuality and the sinthomatic drive to produce and abject them, makes clear, as the twenty-first century starts, that what’s finally at issue in the production of the Child and the future it serves to figure, for Silas Marner, for Scrooge, and for all who must live under futurism’s gun, is the style by which a culture enacts its sinthome while disavowing it.

Je dis toujours la vérité: pas toute, parce que toute la dire, on n’y arrive pas. La dire toute, c’est impossible, matériellement: les mots y manquent. C’est même par cet impossible que la vérité tient au réel” Jacques Lacan, Télévision (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1974), 9.

But note in this a paradox: this emptiness internal to the figure, and into which it breaks, suspending by means of irony all totality and coherence, expresses the presence of jouissance, the insistence of the drive, and the access, therefore, to the perverse satisfaction of which the drive is assured, while desire as enabled by fantasy, though aiming to fill that emptiness by according it a substance and a form, only substitutes absence for presence, endless pursuit for satisfaction, the deferral that conjures futurity for the stuff of jouissance. This, one might say, is the irony of irony’s relation to desire. For just as compassion allows no rhetorical ground outside its logic, no place to stand beyond its enforced Imaginary identifications—by virtue of which, whatever its object or the political ends it serves, compassion is always conservative, always intent on preserving the image in which the ego sees itself—so irony’s negativity calls forth compassion to negate it and thereby marks compassion and all the components of desire, its defining identifications as well as the fantasies that sustain them, with the negativity of the very drive against which they claim to defend. [122] Edelman successfully avoids using the future tense for the rest of this paragraph, but the omission is painfully present and, by implication, deliberate. The transition to living under the principle of sinthomosexuality, as a theoretical remedy to the figurative Child's oppression, must not only be planned out, transitioned to, or executed, but it also carries with it a series of rules that must be doled out conditionally, as in, having a relationship with what will or won't be done in the future. The tension between the pragmatics of sinthomosexuality as an ethical decision is contradicted by a disavowal of the figurative Future wholesale. As a side note, I emphasized "himself" here because Edelman's used queerness as a surrogate for gay men, ostensibly. The most egregious omission here is a demonstrable case of bi erasure, probably because its execution and its existing queerness don't fit the model of an outright rejection of "reproductive futurism" as part of his manifesto of how queers ought to behave in a sinthomosexual fashion. In a weird way by virtue of omission, bisexuality is erased from Edelman's newfound ethics of the queer. So are lesbians who deserve some lip service as womb-bearers who can more outrightly reject the act of birthing as being the owners of the goddamned equipment. In an op-ed piece in the Boston Globe that was published to coincide with Mother’s Day in 1998, Sylvia Ann Hewlett and Cornel West announced their campaign for what they called a “Parent’s Bill of Rights,” a series of proposals designed, in their words, to “strengthen marriage and give greater electoral clout to mothers and fathers.” To achieve such an end—an end both self-serving (though never permitted to appear so) and redundant (what “greater electoral clout” could mothers and fathers have?)—the essay sounded a rallying cry that performed, in the process, and with a heartfelt sincerity untouched by ironic self-consciousness, the authors’ mandatory profession of faith in the gospel of sentimental futurism: Edelman is the author of four books. His first book, Transmemberment of Song: Hart Crane's Anatomies of Rhetoric and Desire, is a critique of Hart Crane's poetry. His second book, Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory, explores the significance of gay literature. His third book, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, is a post-Lacanian analysis of queer theory.